Contested Land, Contested Memory

by Jo Roberts

  Those who lived through the Nakba were surrounded by the daily reminder of their political humiliation. Sami believes that this internalized trauma, both personal and collective, helps to explain Ajami’s post-war reincarnation as the poorest neighbourhood in Tel Aviv–Jaffa, plagued by drugs and violence:

  This feeling of impotence men felt during the Nakba brought the vast majority of the male population in mixed cities** into deep clinical depression. When they got into this depression, many got addicted to opium, or became alcoholic, or got into gambling and prostitution. This is how Ajami became a poor and criminal neighbourhood.

  What Sami tells me of growing up in Ajami is shocking. “Jaffa was neglected by the municipality until the late 1980s, and its infrastructure was not renovated until the last decade. Growing up here, during summer and winter, you have sewage running in the street as part of your daily life — the smell of it. When I went to Tel Aviv University [in the early 1990s] it was strange for me that the area there was clean. Then I started visiting [Jewish-Israeli] friends who were living in houses near the university in north Tel Aviv, and I saw that dirty water was not part of their daily life.”

  From the 1950s to the 1980s, Ajami’s beach was a dump for organic and industrial waste from across central Israel.[23] As a child, Sami and his friends were told not to swim there. “I remember the lifeguard telling us, ‘Children, don’t swim in the garbage area! There are dangerous things, there are oils, metals, glass. Go more to the south, to the cemetery area.’ But because of the neglect of the cemetery area — the Islamic cemetery is right by the beach — the cemetery was getting washed out because the wall was not renovated. It was scarier to swim there because we were swimming with bones.”

  When I met Sami, he was campaigning for the upcoming council elections. We talked in his Spartan storefront campaign office on Yefet, Jaffa’s main street, while he juggled calls on his cellphone and earnest young volunteers moved around us. There was an elderly desktop computer, a whiteboard, and several tables and stacking chairs: little else. “I wish we had more candidates and I wouldn’t have to run,” Sami said. “I would prefer to be an academic. But my society is so weak, we don’t have many potential candidates.”

  Close to twenty thousand Palestinian Israelis now live in Jaffa; most are in Ajami. Yet they are far down on the municipality’s list of priorities: they are a minority in Jaffa, and count for only 3 percent of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa metropolitan area. As council member, Sami faces an uphill battle to make his constituents’ presence felt, in both their current needs and their cultural heritage. After the war, many of the markers of Jaffa’s Arab past were erased — streets were renamed in Hebrew, and old mansions with the signature arches and courtyards of Levantine architecture were destroyed. The physical destruction of much of old Jaffa and the absence of its original inhabitants meant that the city was seen as a blank slate, open to reinterpretation and re-imagining through the prism of the ancient past.††

  By 1970, Jaffa’s preserved Arab buildings had begun to house a thriving colony of Jewish Israeli artists, which became the backbone of an ongoing project of tourism-driven commercial expansion. Old Jaffa is now prime real estate, its “picturesque” Arab architecture a magnet for gentrification. High-end new developments, such as the gated Andromeda Hill community, borrow heavily from Jaffa’s heritage and history; freshly carved limestone arches and courtyards echo those of the shabby mansions a few streets away. “Andromeda Hill is the new old Jaffa, a picturesque neighborhood with paved stone alleyways, graceful arches, sparkling fountains and majestic palm trees, in authentic old Jaffa style,”[24] explains the project’s website. “The sea breeze sweeps over thousands of years of Mediterranean history and mythology.… Andromeda Hill to the north touches on old Jaffa with its picturesque, exotic alleyways.” Built on the site of a demolished neighborhood, this is Jaffa re-imagined, the pleasing Arab architecture sanitized of its history and difficult present.[25] Despite the poverty in Ajami, new or refurbished luxury apartments there now sell for millions of dollars. With real estate at such a premium, the pressure on local residents has grown intense. Yudit Ilany‡‡ describes on her blog the daily details of living in this economic vise:

  There is much poverty. Large families live, right next door to the rich, in small flats. The lovely mansions once owned by wealthy Palestinian families, have been sub-divided into many apartments. Each small apartment houses a family. Twelve people in three rooms is not uncommon. The families often add a room or two, without obtaining a building permit.… The municipality destroys these “illegal” additions. As people need the rooms, they will rebuild them, but often from inferior, cheap materials. So it won’t hurt too much if it’s destroyed once more. Over time the houses start to look like patchwork. A quilt made from blocks, recycled wooden doors, pillars from other destroyed buildings, car windows and cheap iron or asbestos roofing, a quilt that tells the history of a family.[26]

  Property ownership in Israel is complex. The state owns 93 percent of the country’s land, which is managed by the Israel Land Administration (ILA): buying a home actually means buying a lease from the ILA. After the state took ownership of the refugees’ land under the “absentees’ property” legislation, many Palestinian Israeli families in Jaffa rented living space in the surviving houses — sometimes in the home they’d owned before the war. The arrangement, which many never understood, was that they were “protected tenants” on leases that could be passed down only to the next generation and would then expire.[27] The ILA still held ultimate control over what the tenants did with their property, and until 1992, because the entire neighbourhood had been slated for slum clearance, renovation or expansion of an Ajami apartment was illegal.

  As the years passed residents made their own repairs to their houses, believing, as one tenants’ advocate put it, that “We have the walls, the state has the land.”[28] Growing families, unable to afford new homes, divided their own to make room for their children’s young families, or added an extra room. In 2007, 497 families were told they were in breach of their leases, and were given eviction notices by Amidar, the state-controlled housing corporation.[29] Nearly all the affected families are Arab. Their homes will be demolished to make way for new development; and as they have been in technical violation of their leases, they will receive no compensation. Amidar says that it is simply “getting things in order,”[30] and denies the charges of racism levelled at it by the local community. While 195 families are effectively squatting abandoned buildings, the rest are living in the homes their parents or grandparents owned before the 1948 War. Amidar is pursuing them with vigour: one elderly woman received an eviction notice for renovations carried out by a previous tenant, who had left before she moved in as a young bride more than fifty years ago.[31]

  “Busloads of wealthy Jews from Tel Aviv and abroad come in and are shown the beautiful houses, to see how good an investment it would be to buy here,”[32] Abed Satel told me as we walked through the unpaved, sandy alleyways hidden behind Ajami’s larger streets. “Olive trees were brought in from the West Bank as part of the beautification. All this is part of the Nakba.” Born and raised in Jaffa, Abed has been a member of al-Rabita, the League of Jaffa Arabs, since it was founded in 1979 in response to an earlier spate of municipal demolitions. Al-Rabita’s proudly non-sectarian activists, Muslims and Christians, tap into their besieged ethnicity as a source of collective pride. They run a kindergarten and school, and the plays, concerts, and discussions at their cultural centre help foster a sense of Arab-Jaffan identity. The group’s past legal victories have prevented the municipal closure of their school and ended municipal dumping on Ajami’s beach.

  A few citizens’ groups and ventures such as the popular, leftist, and Arab/Jewish-owned Yafa Books and Café, manage to straddle the ethnic divide in this mixed city. Anti-demolition protests can count on support from local Jewish Israeli activists like Yudit, and amongst some of Jaffa’s long-established Jewish residents and the
ir Arab neighbours there is a sense of common cause. But the division runs deep. One Jewish residents’ association has rented out the local swimming pool once a fortnight for a Jews-only day.[33] Violent incidents among the Arab residents at the pool had become too much, they stated, in a sweeping generalization that apparently sanctioned ethnic segregation.

  Now a new player has arrived on the scene. In 2009, the B’emuna corporation successfully bid for the land of Ajami’s open-air market, which was being sold by the ILA into private ownership, and is constructing a housing project for twenty families. The units are being marketed exclusively to ultra-Orthodox-nationalist Jews.

  “The extreme right party, the National Union, decided that they should bring Jewish settlers into mixed cities after what happened in Gaza,§§ to ‘reinforce’ the Jewish community,” Sami told me. B’emuna also has settlement projects in the West Bank. “We have an agenda that Jews should live in Israel. This is not racist. It’s the normal thing to do for a nation that returns to its homeland,”[34] B’emuna representative Yehoshua Mor-Yossef said to the Jerusalem Post. Israel Zeira, the group’s CEO, describes Ajami as having “added ideological value.”[35]

  The move has horrified Arab inhabitants of Jaffa and their allies, who have rallied against B’emuna’s project. They are all too aware of the situation in the West Bank, where toe-hold settlements quickly grow into established villages, “facts on the ground” that flag the Occupied Territories as part of Greater Israel, plot by plot. House by house, the same is happening in the Arab Quarter of Jerusalem. “The language they use is of strengthening the Jewish community,”[36] Yudit Ilany commented to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But pardon me, if that is their interest, why don’t they go to the neighborhoods of Jaffa where there are many economically disadvantaged Jewish families?” “It’s business,”[37] B’emuna’s lawyer David Zeira explained to a Knesset hearing. Rebutting claims that the purchase was part of an agenda to judaise the neighbourhood, he asserted, “The first ideology is it is cheap and it is next to Tel Aviv.” Despite the protests, B’emuna’s desire for a real-estate bridgehead into Ajami may be accommodated simply by the workings of market forces.

  Sami Abu Shehaheh is pessimistic about the future of Jaffa’s Arab residents.

  The very small minority not expelled during 1948 will now be expelled by different tools: economics, capital, settlers coming into Ajami and Jaffa, and the shift of Israeli politics to the extreme right.

  Having Jaffa as a Jewish community rather than a mixed community is something that could happen, and it would not mean anything bad to the vast majority of Israeli society. It will be represented as something modernizing, developing; all the nice words. They will have a new history of the place: “this was a poor area when Arabs were living here, but then became modernized and beautiful.” We will be mentioned as drug dealers and criminals.

  The process of gentrification is haphazard, not streamlined, and the web of interaction between the municipality and the developers is highly complicated.[38] Councillors are divided over how much to promote demolition and development, and over how much to actively support the ethos of Jaffa as a mixed city — another B’emuna bid was nixed by the municipality. High rents push out the poor in cities all over the world, and Saudi millionaires as well as B’emuna are buying up property in Ajami.[39] Ultimately, the effect is the same: Ajami’s Palestinian residents are being squeezed out.

  In Israel’s nationalist narrative, their presence there has been ephemeral all along. From this perspective, Jaffa is part of the land of Israel, and so by definition its history is Jewish. Its old buildings, aesthetically appealing and evocative, can be re-created and refined in the context of a Jewish population, as part of a process of purging contemporary Jaffa of poverty and criminality. Similar dynamics are at work in Palestinian-nationalist representations of the past, in which Palestine was always and only Arab and the Jewish fighting forces were alien invaders.[40] The difference is that Jewish nationalist imaginings are combined with the political and economic power to make them a reality.

  An hour’s drive north of Jaffa, residents of the small Arab community of Ayn Hawd are only too familiar with this re-imagining of the landscape.

  In the Carmel Mountains overlooking the Mediterranean lies the artists’ colony of Ein Hod. Old stone residences now house galleries and studios, and the charm of the place has made it a popular destination for tourists. A few kilometres beyond, after the road has dwindled to a stony track, is Ayn Hawd. It was founded in 1948 when Arab residents of what is now Ein Hod, fleeing the approaching Haganah forces, took refuge in their shepherds’ huts on a nearby hilltop. There they have remained ever since.

  Home to some 250 people, Ayn Hawd was off the map until 1994, “unrecognized” by the Israeli government. Its mayor, Muhammad Abu al-Hayyja, has struggled for decades for the provision of basic municipal services. Sitting in the courtyard of Habayit, Ayn Hawd’s gourmet restaurant and only business, he told me the story of that struggle.[41]

  My parents came from the original village, which was called Ayn Hawd before 1948. After the war all the inhabitants of that village moved all over the world, about nine hundred people. Just one family moved here, to this mountain, about forty-five people. My parents hid here until the war would be over; they thought they could come back to the village.

  But in 1951, with the passing of the “present absentee” legislation, the Abu al-Hayyjas realized they would not be returning to their village. “We are present to pay taxes and we are absent in terms of rights to the original village,” Muhammad commented. “So, my parents decided to make a life here. They had nowhere to go, and this land belonged to them.” The family, and the other villagers who had made it back to join them, resumed their traditional way of life, tending their orchards and grazing their goats on the terraced slopes.

  In 1959, the government confiscated this land. The policy was to make some difficulties for the people here, to make them move along. Not to push them, but to make difficulties. In 1965, they established a building law which made this an agricultural area. You cannot live in an agricultural area, and all the houses become illegal, retroactively. So we became illegal, living in illegal houses.

  A barbed-wire fence was put up around the village, and their terraces planted over with cypress trees.[42]

  Another pressure was to make this area a national park, which happened in 1971. In the same year, they also made this a military area. And in the seventies also they made a law called the Black Goat Law: you cannot keep goats and cows because it’s a danger to the national park. We made our living through agriculture — goats, cows, vegetables, trees, fruit — we lived from the land. So we sold everything and we began to go and find work outside the village.

  But perhaps the direst effect of Ayn Hawd’s illegal status was that, although its residents paid taxes, they could not access the basic services that municipalities provide: water, electricity, and sewage; roads, clinics, and schools.

  The Services Law in 1981 said that any house that wanted to be connected to the services of the government should have a licence. And we have no licences because they make us illegal, so we cannot be connected to the services of the government.

  In 1978 Muhammad’s grandfather, who had led the villagers, stepped down, and asked Muhammad to take over.

  He thought that the new kids are educated (I had studied in Haifa, at the university), and that they can solve these problems, and we also thought the same. I thought then that I was an equal citizen in Israel, and I thought that I could lead the village and solve some of our problems, me and other people in our village committee.

  We began to write the government and to ask for services, and slowly we began to understand that it wasn’t so easy. We began to understand the real situation.

  In 1985, the village committee organized a demonstration demanding basic services, and Arab and Jewish supporters came and joined them. The government responded by issuing demolition orders for t
he houses in Ayn Hawd. But then, the villagers discovered their situation was not unique.

  We had thought we were the only village without services in Israel. But we discovered in 1986 that there are many people like us. So the committee of this village visited the others, and [together] we established a new association to solve the problem of the unrecognized villages in Israel.

  We went to the government; we made the problem known in Israel, in the media; we went to conferences; we lobbied members of the Knesset. We went abroad, also: we talked to universities, ambassadors, members of parliament; we even went to the United Nations.

  In 1994, Ayn Hawd and three other Arab villages were officially recognized. But now they faced another problem. Land use in Israel is strictly monitored by the state through the use of “master plans” that determine zoning, development, and construction. The villages had been deemed “unrecognized” because they had been ignored on the regional master plan. Now each village needed a master plan of its own. The villagers had put forward their own plan in 1992, which was partially accepted by the government. But when the official master plan was finally released in 2005, the village had been allotted a minimal amount of land (about half the physical space allotted to the cowsheds of a nearby collective farm),[43] leaving several houses outside the village perimeter and thus illegal. The plan allowed no room for any further expansion. And still there were reasons why Ayn Hawd could not receive municipal services.